ABOUT

This post will change every now and again but will always detail what things supporters of the site can do to help Gvid, in order of strategic value.

At the time being in order is:
1: (new) Upload OC, sample topics at https://gvid.pw/analytics
2. Upload
3. Share
4. Test and report
5: Tag keywords at https://gvid.pw/lowkeywords
6. Make your own css change suggestions, or make themes in stylish and share
7. Comment
7. When Voat goes down hang out at Gvid.

(old but still applicable) Tagging videos is currently the most important of these because this is needed to make the new search feature work. It shouldn't be long before we are caught up here if people do put in an effort. (For the most part search works now which is a function of people tagging. https://gvid.pw/analytics shows the searches people made without content returning so those are good words and phrases to tag things with).

Uploading is the next important of all because we need the users to upload rather than me. If you are a fan of the site and want to cheer it on the best thing you can do is upload.

The comment system is in but more comments invite others to comment. That's the start of forming a community.

I see a lot of people uploading to youtube. Now there are a lot of advantages to youtube. Profit and reach. There's nothing wrong with that but when things start getting taken down and people complain I shake my head because it all was foreseeable from the beginning. History repeating itself over and over.

I want to be able to help but we live in a world dominated by google. I've even had to give google money recently doing SEO for other people. People are addicted to google. I could do a paid campaign on any other site and it would be just as effective but clients want to see themselves rank on google, and they want it now. It's all they care about because they know all of you use google.

We live in an era when we can see what is dangerous or is actively attacking us and still lack the discipline to not feed it. I wish people would get off google completely. It's like watching a person get bit by a snake repeatedly. Every time they reach in the basket they get bitten and the only thing that you can remark is, "what the hell did you think was going to happen!". Stop reaching into the google basket. I'm not even mad, just perplexed. I see the same behavior over and over and I don't know what's going to break the cycle.

That's why I build gvid. I don't know that it's going to break the cycle but I had to have some hope that something would and I had to do at least some part while I was watching people do the same thing over and over even if it fails. It will likely fail but at least I tried. I wish some people would try to put some effort into removing google from their lives. I don't care what you do to do it. Do something.

This is why I know our society is doomed. So many secret conspiracies aginst you. You are lucky if you can uncover them in time. But when someone is abusing your rights in broad daylight, you do nothing. When someone kicks you around in broad daylight you do nothing. Trump was supposed to be the moment we realized we can do something. Well, we need a new something to do. Killing google might be a good option. Are we going to put this off because we have to kill it someday, so let's just do it now.

How the comment system works:(as it will when it is complete, but 90% of this is accurate)

Comments load only if you scroll down. Each comment can only be voted up to prevent downvote censoring. If you don't like what someone says, say something more intelligent, more correct. This encourages rational discussion and also forces people to see what they don't like. This is a good thing.

Each comment can have up to four sub-comments and a page can have a comment depth of four. You can always still comment though.

The exception is applied to videos themselves which can have more.

Replying to a comment that has four or more children will slide one comment off. Comments like youtube are not permanent. Removal is probabilistic and inversely proportional to comment score. This leaves the important things to say up on the page.

If you comment or vote while not logged in a modal will log you in or register you and perform the vote or comment submission at the same time. This is all done without reloading the page.

What is missing and likely will be placed in tomorrow:

There are no restrictions on comment depth currently.
Videos need their exception of more comments applied.
Various visual improvements.
Various minor bug fixes

Far future and aspirations:

I want to have the comments look way more interesting. I think they should be the visual flair on the page and to do that I would love to allow for user submitted comment themes. I have so many crazy thoughts of how to do it. I'd actually like it to every 50th page load or maybe based on time (like once a day) disregard the user's selected theme and render with another popularly selected theme just so every now and again the comments look amazing in an unexpected way. Themes would be with a combination of css and a toggle select of how you want the javascript to structure the html. The javascript would be coded by me and the css by users. Possibly make it so a user can have at most one theme so to load another theme you just select it by user name. If you want to contribute more themes just make users who's sole purpose is to publish a theme.

I also more immediately want to play around with what I call equal spacing comments. Basically, instead of the comments being nested in html they all are on the same level of the document but have an indentation property. There are things you can do visually with that which can't be done with nesting because with nesting a series of comments have their bottom margin and padding add up. You can visually fill the space with borders and shading (this is what voat and gvid do currently) but I wonder if a cleaner look is possible with equal spacing.

Conclusion:

I just think it's great that youtube, a large corporation, can't figure out conversational continuity. You can't figure out who's arguing with who on there and any thread just breaks down. But I can manage to solve that problem in a day. This is what the people can do. Suck it youtube.https://gvid.pw

In order to be less annoying than youtube auto play is off by default. It can be turned on. I started making a slider for it but then I realize, a one click toggle, that's a check box. I've always been a fan of raw utility over all else so that's what we went with. I also put it somewhat out of the way so that it is not the focus of the suggestion bar. If you right click you can add a video either to the top or bottom of the queue and if the check box is clicked then it will auto play. This helps if listening to music to decide if you want to listen to a song right away or add it to the back. But it's also handy if you see two videos you want to watch. Even if you don't have the auto play on, the videos will remain on the display so you can click on them later without renavigating.

Clicking on a video in the queue removes it.

Right now when the auto play is turned on (from the queue) when the queue runs out it interprets the next suggested video as the top of the queue. I'm still working out what would serve the user's interests best. One argument could be made that they are in queue mode and they mearly didn't keep up queuing videos and the next suggested is the best guess. Another argument is that is the end of the queue and continuing to auto play videos is annoying. I was thinking about having two auto play toggles. That's my main thought right now. The last time I asked if people would like an option for more videos on the front one person came up with the obvious idea of just making the headers clickable, so I've learned that if I'm unsure what people will want most to just ask.

So the front page has managed to get a big bump in OC and I just want to encourage anyone else who's been thinking about doing it to give it a try. You can't do worse than my videos: https://gvid.pw/v/s6jnPA

GVid now lets you edit your password, email, and even username on the fly. This can be found on the same management page where you can edit video thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and next video. https://gvid.pw/manage

The last one (editing usernames) is a bit unusual for most sites but someone asked for it and was @Disappointed when it wasn't already a feature. What's the worst that could go wrong? It's a troll's site anyway.

Pages now link back. You can link to two different sites and both will see the other community.

So there is a whitelist and blacklist, and everything else gets logged. Whites have their links show. Blacks get ignored because I can't understand them. If a link from your site doesn't show it's likely in the middle. I'll get it whited when I see it and get any past links in.

So far I can handle:

voat.co
reddit.com
vigilantcitizenforums.com

This isn't a function of development or time. It's a function bing, yahoo, facebook all giving me meaningless junk. If your site has meaningful urls it's as easy as adding it to a list.

Plans exist to transcode in place and then cache the file for those remaining browsers. I've already tested it some but I'm having trouble finding browsers with that issue to finish tests with. I know they exist. It's something like 1/3 of palemoon users. I've done some research and some people on forums have had to go behind the hood to get mp4 to play on palemoon but the majority have zero issues. When I installed palemoon with Manjaro I couldn't repeat the issue so it may depend on how yours is distributed, and the codecs on the machine.

This is not what happened in the prior case. That was the first issue I brought up where nodejs fails silently. This one is almost completely mitigated. Now the server is actively polled for the issue and restarted in a matter of seconds, then it behaves normally.

But we did serve 4000 views and 15 gigabytes.

But this is a process. We ran traffic to the server, had an issue, and patched it. Doing this iteratively is a necessary part of beating investor controlled websites.

I've also built a load ranker for the site so we can target slower periods, get the data we need for improvements, but do it at a steady pace.

One user suggested making it so you could click on the section headers to load more new, popular, quick. I think ajaxifying it might be a good idea. What do you guys think?

I'm feeling more and more confident in the video cdn I'm making. I want to focus on it next and not let much else get in the way. Afer that I hope to role out monetization for uploaders.

We are going to have ads that you add by the footer. Sure that will make the ads worth less than if they displayed over the video and what not. We aren't super money hungery. We honestly don't need that much money to run as it stands right now. 5c per "site-day" would cover it but that would leave nothing for the uploaders. Considering I want to give 90% to the uploaders we're going to have to go a bit higher than the 5c minimum. I have an adjusting model that would allow us to maximize what we can give the uploaders, sigma(c*p^2)/sigma(c*p)*sqrt(A/T). (Revenue-expense)*90% would go to uploaders. So Voat charges $55 per day and we're going to charge 5c minimum per day, but they have way more traffic and a sidebar ad.

We also plan to have nearly no limit on ad size, because it's on the bottom, so you can add whatever you want. We aren't really going to vet ads.

In the future I plan to make it a twice redundant storage solution that auto-balance based on the storage capacity and bandwidth capacity of each of the servers. That's what I had been trying to do but it turned out harder than I though. I'll figure it out though.

After that though the DLFU code will be pretty useless (dynamic least frequently used) because it will be super cheap to store a lot of video. (You just get a few servers with cheap storage, and a few servers with high bandwidth and it all works out automatically balances big rarely used files end up on the cheap storage and currently being watched files migrate to the fast servers).

It is keyword based. It ranks videos by relevance to your keyword phrase. Each search query is broken up into keywords and contiguous combination key works phrases.

'Dog bites Muslim'

dog

bites

muslim

dog bites

bites muslim

dog bites muslim

1

1

1

4

4

9

The more a video's keywords match the keywords of your search the higher the relevance will rank.
This means that keywords can be multiple words or one words on videos as well.
The videos are then ranked by a combination of relevance with newness, popularity, and quickness.

The big issue is that we need more tagging because most videos were uploaded with no keywords. If you want to watch some videos on the site and help at the same time there is a page that ranks how popular a video is and how badly it needs keywords. https://gvid.pw/lowkeywords.

If you see a video that looks interesting, add some keywords, then share it. Don't be afraid to do long and short phrases. Topics are important too. Funny, politics, tutorial, diy, music. Most searches, while there is less content, will be most successful searching for topics.